Nowadays, a message gateway has been commonly used as a kind of intermediate device for a telecommunication value-added service to send and receive a message to and from a mobile communication network. A typical example is a short message gateway, multimedia message center and Parlay X gateway for processing the short message or multimedia message. As shown in FIG. 1, an end user may send a short message or a multimedia message to the telecommunication value-added application 13 via his handhold terminal 10 to request a related service. For example, the end user may request for downloading a mobile ring tone. The message sent by the end user will be intercepted by the message gateway 12 and then sent to an address that is specified by the message so that the telecommunication value-added application 13 can obtain the message sent by the end user.
Currently, there are two ways for the telecommunication value-added application to obtain a message from the gateway: a push mode 15 and a poll mode 16. In the push mode 15, once the message gateway 12 obtains a message from the communication network 11, the message gateway sends the message to a corresponding application 13 immediately. While in the poll mode 16, the application 13 requests the arrived message from the message gateway 12 periodically.
Generally, if the number of messages is large, the poll mode is more efficient than the push mode, since the application may obtain a set of messages by one message requesting action. Contrarily, as for the push mode, the message gateway can push only one message to the application once, bringing a great interaction load.
For those simple applications which obtain only messages from the network, such as an application for the mobile user's short message television quiz, advantage of the poll mode will be more obvious. With respect to the message gateway, the application is located in an application client 14. When the application needs the related message, it requests for the related message from the message gateway actively. However, for the push mode, the application may only passively receive messages sent from the message gateway, so the application has to maintain on-line state, which results in heavier and more complex workload of receiving message.
In the poll mode, it is an important issue how to determine an appropriate polling cycle. This is because a too-short polling cycle needlessly increases the workload of the message gateway, while a too-long polling cycle would render too many messages waiting to be processed. Thus, it becomes very important how to improve efficiency and service quality of the message gateway by determining a better polling cycle.
One solution is for an administrator to manually set the polling cycle according to his/her experience regardless of currently running condition of the message gateway. However, when there are not so many corresponding messages for the application, this usual method of simply, periodically polling the message gateway will lead to unnecessary load for the message gateway.
Similarly, for many other information apparatus in addition to the message gateway, the same efficiency problem occurs in the information polling. The above is to explain problems in the prior art by example of the message gateway, only because the problem of the polling cycle of the message in the message gateway is the most exigent. The method, apparatus and system provided by the invention are not limited to the message gateway and its related method.
According what is needed is a method and system to over come the problems encountered in the prior art and to provide an improved polling cycle for message delivery.